Matt Van Buren grew up in upstate NY, spent time in Los Angeles during and after college, and then returned to the East Coast to get his MFA from the New School. Cats, dogs, and children tend to like him, in spite of his best efforts.

If I Knew Sign Language I'd Tell You That You're Beautiful (February 20, 2009. Issue 15.)

I was at the gym when it happened. A nothing night during a nothing week, surrounded by the usual gym crowd. One or two members of the physical elite -- a guy with muscles cut from city blocks, a pony-tailed woman with supple limbs and high breasts. The rest just normal. Regular faces on your regular street. Overweight people on treadmills, walking fast and sweating buckets and wondering how long till they hit the benchmark “fifteen pounds down.” Skinny people working solo, protein shakes swirling in their stomachs, rectangle weights rising and falling as they push and pull. Elderly people stopping by on doc’s orders, circling the track at a slow shuffle.

Most of these people were just drifting through. They’d institute a strict Monday-Wednesday-Friday regimen, then close shop after week one. They’d knock off a few pounds before returning to cheeseburgers and chili fries. Changing yourself from fat to thin doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a discipline these people didn’t have. They weren’t like me. I was already in good shape. Damn good, compared to most. Well-defined muscles. Six-pack stomach. I could run forever. And it was all because of discipline.

And I’ll be honest, I couldn’t even look at the out-of-shape people. Show me a jiggling stomach or a muffin ass and I’d start thinking about my lunch spread out across the floor. The idea alone almost made me sick. Maybe that’s wrong, but it’s who I was. When I came in to work out I kept my head down, eyes on my feet. Most of the time. But that day I looked up, just for a second, and I saw her.

She stepped onto a stairmaster a few rows in front of my treadmill and the first thing I noticed was her hair. Dark brown, long and straight, hanging down in front of her eyes. People usually tie their long hair up when they work out, because nobody likes sweaty strands clinging to their cheeks, but she let hers droop to her shoulders. That’ll get messy, I thought. Her body was thin and gangly and she had red lips and blue eyes. A blonde grabbed the machine next to her. She was thicker around the middle than the first girl but still in decent shape. The second girl made a strange gesture with her hands and then both stairmasters groaned to life. At the same time. Like she’d whispered in some kind of secret code.

She was cute, the first girl. Pretty, even. I thought about saying hi, maybe asking for her phone number. But walking up to girls doesn’t come easy for me. I’m okay once a conversation starts or if I’ve been introduced, but the initial contact always gets me. Sometimes I make a move, but just as often I let the opportunity slide.

You wouldn’t think it to look at me now, but I used to be pretty heavy. It snuck up on me during puberty. Along with my face lengthening and shoulders thickening and hair sprouting from my armpits and balls, my metabolism slowed down and I grew from barb-wire thin to “big-boned” fat. By the time junior year rolled around, I was somewhere between chunky and grotesquely obese. My friend Larry started introducing me to people as “my buddy Jack, and my other buddy Jack.” Kids pretended to hide their lunches when I passed by. One time a girl asked me to move to the other end of the lunch table. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t eat with you sitting in front of me.” But that was only one time. After that, she’d just get up and move herself.

And then one day Mom draped her arm across my shoulders and showed me a picture of the old me, the skinny me, the little kid me. Climbing out of a swimming pool, red trunks riding up my legs, a few ribs visible in my thin torso. Then she held up a picture from the summer before. Me sitting next to a pool, a dark blue shirt covering the thick roll of flesh above my waist, chubby face hidden behind black sunglasses. She smiled and poked me in the stomach. Giggled at me like the Pillsbury Doughboy. Put the picture away and went back to her housework. I knew this was her way of saying she didn’t care what I looked like. That she loved me no matter what. But no matter which way you slice it, she was also calling me fat.

That night, when Mom rolled out the meat loaf and mashed potatoes, I didn’t eat my customary second helping. When I left the table, it wasn’t to lie on my bed and masturbate to the latest Playboy centerfold, it was to squeeze into an old pair of shorts and go out for a run. I ran every night after that. After a few weeks I was running in the mornings, too. It became mandatory, like breathing or sleeping.

But it was also the hardest thing I ever had to do. My first run lasted two and half minutes before I fell sideways into a bush, clutching my chest and wheezing and convinced my heart was about to burst. But the pain gradually subsided. Breathing became easier. I lifted myself off the ground and made my way home, slowly, rusted joints and atrophied muscles screaming with every step. Next day, I lasted three and half minutes before the same thing happened. This time I lost consciousness. It couldn’t have been for more than a few seconds, but blacking out is blacking out. I was facing the night sky when I came to and the first thing I saw were the three stars that make up Orion’s belt. After a few minutes I stood up and walked home.

On the fifth night I ran for ten minutes without falling down.

Okay, it was more like eight and a half.

The subscription to Men’s Health, the enrollment at the local gym, the change in diet from Doritos and donuts to carrot sticks and rice cakes -- all that came later, after I’d already lost a ton of weight. In the beginning I only cared about the running. I kept expecting it to get easier, to become something I enjoyed. It never has. I dread stepping onto a treadmill. But I do it everyday, rain or shine, sick or healthy, because that little fat kid still hides inside me.

Watching the girls on their stairmasters, I assigned them names in my head. The normal girl, the blah girl, the blonde, she was Michelle. I decided the brunette was Teresa. I’d never known a Teresa before.

They only spent a minute climbing fake stairs before switching to the ellipticals. I realized my twenty-minute run was half over and I wasn’t even breathing hard. My treadmill was set to 9.5 mph, which is about twice as fast as most of these tools, but like I said, I’m in good shape. Even so, it should have been hitting me harder. I should have been more worn out. Michelle turned to Teresa and signaled with her hands. They stepped off the machines and moved onto the treadmills directly ahead of me.

I figured Teresa had probably never been to a gym before. Michelle was giving her a quick tour, showing her the ropes, letting her taste what each machine felt like before moving on.

I wondered how things would turn out. If I did go in. Maybe we’d hit it off right away. She’d let me take her out for ice cream. Or we could share a slice later that week. I could show her some of the finer points of the workout process. Maybe demonstrate the use of some weight machines. The lat raise. The biceps curl.

Teresa turned her head and our eyes met. I don’t know if anything really happened between us or if it was only my imagination, but I felt something. And when she turned away something else happened. I saw a cream-colored plastic piece along the upper ridge of her ear. A nearly invisible transparent tube crawling into her ear canal. What is that? I thought. I watched Michelle go through another series of gestures, and I could see they were more deliberate than I’d thought before. More complex. I saw her mouth move with her hands, but she didn’t say anything. Not out loud.

Teresa answered with thin fingers and graceful hands. But she spoke along with each hand motion, too, and her voice had the slowness and thickness of someone who’d never heard herself speak.

That was when I decided I had to talk to her. I thought about all the things she’d never be able to do. Drive a car. Listen to music. She and Michelle were smiling back and forth at each other and Teresa looked happy, but behind her smiling eyes and the laughter, I saw sadness. The kind a person doesn’t even realize exists. The kind you can’t see unless you’re on the outside looking in. And for some reason, that made me want to talk to her. To be close to her. I wanted to reach past her layers – her dark hair, her pale skin, her red-lipped smile. I wanted to push everything else aside and touch the part she kept hidden. But how do you talk to someone who can’t hear what you’re saying?

I hopped off the treadmill, even though my twenty minutes weren’t up. Turned the machine off and waited while it rattled to a stop. I wiped stray drops of sweat off my face and the machine. Watched Michelle reach for her towel and dab at her forehead. Watched Teresa pause her run, bend down to re-tie her cross-trainers. I went to the weight room.

What would it be like to go out with a girl you couldn’t talk to? How would we communicate? Would I have to learn sign language? Maybe she could read lips. But even if she could, how would she talk back? What would sex be like? Would she sound different than a girl who wasn’t deaf? And what if everything worked out perfectly, like in some Hollywood happy ending? What if we fell in love and got married and had kids? What kind of mother would she be?

I pictured Teresa washing dishes in a strange kitchen, me tip-toeing up behind, wrapping my arms around her belly and pressing my lips against her neck. Her jumping a foot because she didn’t know I was there. The two of us in a dark theatre, watching a sub-titled French film so we can both understand the plot, her hand soft and cool in mine. Dancing slow to a Sade song, bass to the max so she can feel the music. Lying in bed together, no way to speak with the lights off, just breathing.

I heard a short scream followed by laughter. I looked up to find them in the room with me. Michelle had spilled something red down her front. Her hands were in the air and her mouth was open, like she couldn’t believe what had happened. Teresa leaned down to pick up the container, laughing. Her laugh sounded normal. Not horsey or too high. Regular. Holding her arms away from her soaked shirt, Michelle left the room. Teresa was alone.

One chance.

I carried a workout routine card with me, a checklist where I filled out which exercises I did, how many reps, etc. I tore the card in half and flipped to the blank side, scribbled the first thing that came to mind, and went in.

She’d moved the spilled juice container to the side where no one would step on it and sat down at the shoulder press. She looked up at me. Blue eyes on blue eyes. For a second I felt like I couldn’t do this, like I should run and keep running and never stop. But I was already there and I didn’t know what else to do so I dropped the card in her lap.

And then I took off. A fast walk straight out the door, past the rows of treadmills and stairmasters and ellipticals, a sharp left around a corner and into a side room people used for sit-ups and stretches. On my way through the door I tripped and almost fell. Had to reach for the wall to steady myself. I felt my heart beating hard in my chest. The lip of the doorway warped away from the floor on one side, and my foot had clipped it on the way through. I leaned against the wall and wiped a hand across my eyes. Slowed my breathing down. I didn’t know why I’d walked away. Was I afraid? Nervous, sure, but not afraid. I turned to go back and then froze. I realized this was a good thing. I’d let her think about the note, about me, while I wasn’t around. It was the right move.

I thought about the scene in the weight room. Michelle would be back by now. Teresa might be showing her the note, explaining what had happened with frenetic hand movements. Maybe Michelle was teasing her. And maybe Teresa was smiling.

Or maybe it hadn’t had any effect. She could have read it and dropped it in the trash. Michelle would come back and not even know anything had happened.

An enormous woman waddled up to the doorway, moving slowly and grunting with each step. Dark curly hair clung to her sweaty cheeks and her feet barely lifted off the floor when she walked. She turned to come into the room and I realized what was about to happen. I could have stopped it, but I didn’t. All I could think about was how I didn’t want to touch her huge body. As she shuffled inside, her foot caught the doorway lip, just like mine had. But she couldn’t catch herself. And when she fell it wasn’t fast like you might expect. She dropped slowly, like the lazy swing of a wrecking ball just before it smashes into a condemned building. I did try to catch her, once I considered how dangerous a fall could be for someone that size, but it was too late. I reached her just as her back met the floor. The air rushing away from her massive shape as it collapsed earthward and the breath whooshing from her lungs made the whole thing feel like a bomb going off. Like I needed to hold onto her to keep from being knocked back. Her shirt was soaked with sweat and I could feel it sinking into my palms, into the tips of my fingers. She laid there for a minute. Soundless. When she started moving again I helped her stand. With both hands. She thanked me for the help, but she didn’t look at me. Her eyes never got off the floor. And then she left.

When she was out of sight, I wiped my hands across the wall. I’d have used my shorts, but I didn’t want her sweat on my clothes. It felt disgusting. Repulsive. All I wanted was to be dry. But the wall only seemed to make my hands wetter. And the sweat smelled awful. I could hardly breathe. I wiped them faster up and down the wall. Harder. Finally I gave up and used my shorts, but that didn’t help either. My hands stayed wet. When the wall became blurry, I thought the sweat had gotten into my eyes. I rubbed them with the backs of my hands, but couldn’t make them dry. I was crying. I lifted my shirt up to my face and held it there while my shoulders shook.

After a few minutes I stepped out of the stretch room, planning to slip quietly down to the locker room, grab my stuff and head home. But when I turned the corner I found Teresa, skinny frame pacing the hall, my routine card in hand. Michelle wasn’t with her. She craned her neck and glanced around corners, like she was searching for something. She looked in my direction and I pulled back fast into the stretch room. I didn’t want her to see me. She stopped. I heard her stand still and wait, but I didn’t move. I stayed hidden.

I thought about the note. About the message I’d written. Damn it, why was I hiding? She was only a few steps away, just around the corner, but I didn’t go to her. I couldn’t. Like with the fat woman, but different. I peeked around the corner and watched as she pushed a lock of hair over her ear. Took a good long look at the earpiece. I turned back to the stretch room and hit the wall with the flat of my hand. Not hard. Not loud.

She was still in the lobby when I looked again, but her back was to me. She unfolded the note, looked at it a few seconds, and slipped it into her pocket. I stared at her back as she walked toward the weight room. At the muscles moving in the backs of her legs. The sway of her hair. Her arms swinging lightly as she walked away.